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How to use your old Huawei E169 UMTS Stick on Mac OS X Lion

It is time to take care of older Hardware running on Mac OS X Lion. This blog post will be about my old Huawei E169 USB UMTS stick, which I use from time to time when no WLAN is available.

Its software was designed to be used under 10.5, so the upgrade to 10.6 was also problematical.

Lion uses a new 64 bit kernel, therefore the older drivers from Snow Leopard do not work anymore. After searching Google, I found this blog post which links to a new driver package. This package is from the english support page of the provider three, however its mpkg installer package contains the necessary drivers for Lion. So you can go ahead and extract the downloaded zip. You will find a file called „3Connect Installer.app“. You can right click and view its content. In Contents/Resources you will find the wanted „mobilemanager.mpkg“. Right Click again and go into Contents/Packages. If you deciced to just upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, then you won’t need the „mobile_manager_application.pkg“. This should be already installed if you used the stick before. However you will need the „huawei_universal_425_05.pkg“. This file contains the necessary drivers for Lion.

After you installed these drivers, you can go check your network settings and devices in your system preferences pane. My Mobile Partner complained about a missing phone number, which needs to be called. This was a crucial part of the installation, because I thought that the Lion Update kept all necessary network interfaces and settings. However it will forget the number that needs to be called. So you need to add „*99#“ to the network adapter.

You should be ready to go by now, press connect and try to establish a connection on Lion. Of course you should at least run once the MobilePartner application so that you can enter your SIM pin number.